Editor’s note: This post was updated on August 10, 2017 to reflect a correction issued by the New York Times. It reads: “An article on Tuesday about a sweeping federal climate change report referred incorrectly to the availability of the report. While it was not widely publicized, the report was uploaded by the nonprofit Internet Archive in January; it was not first made public by The New York Times.”

A U.S. government study finds that climate change is already affecting many aspects of American life and that record-setting temperatures are likely to become the new norm.

A copy of the draft report, first reported by The New York Times, details the consequences of a dramatic rise in temperature observed in the United States since 1980, including impacts to agriculture, water supplies, infrastructure and human health.

The report’s findings are among the most comprehensive yet compiled.

The future of the government report, which is at odds with the official stance on climate change from the Trump Administration, is unclear. But it is just the latest gathering of scientific evidence of the effects that a changing climate is already having.

“The report brings the impacts of climate change home,” said Shyla Raghav, a climate change expert at Conservation International (CI). “In the past, we’ve tended to discuss adaptation as a developing country issue. Now, this national assessment and associated science allows us to understand how the United States is rapidly transforming in a changing climate. We can all now see that climate change is something that directly impacts our well-being, security, and future.”

“Thankfully, communities, cities, states and companies all around the United States understand what’s at stake and why it makes sense to act on climate change now,” added Raghav.

Post navigation

Comments

The people who believe in AGW caused by CO2 are the people who are denying science. The science of thermalization and the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of molecule energy explain why CO2 does not now, has never had and will never have a significant effect on climate.
A potentially more important factor to humanity than failing to acknowledge that CO2 has no significant effect on climate is failing to recognize what actually does and that is the increasing atmospheric water vapor. It is rising more than twice as fast as it should be based on the feedback of temperature increase and is the only thing countering the temperature decline that would otherwise be occurring. (‘Otherwise’ results from declining net effect of ocean cycles since 2005 and declining solar activity which has been declining since 2014 and dropped below ‘breakeven’ in early 2016.)